


used to be better

by nebulousviolet



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Drifting, Multi, Sadness, but more melancholic, idk what this is, lowercase abuse, slight angst i suppose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-01 01:50:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12694575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulousviolet/pseuds/nebulousviolet
Summary: some debts you can never repay. nicky knows too much about fate.





	used to be better

**Author's Note:**

> this is very soft and melancholy,,, i feel like this fandom gives nicky way too much immaturity and clingyness? he’s not a child, and i wish ppl would stop infantilising him. sometimes letting go is harder than anything else. very much inspired by dust and ashes from great comet, but no direct references are there as far as i can tell, apart from the title.

some things, you know, are simply down to fate. nicky doesn’t believe in god, but surely there is more to coincidence than a simple alignment of the stars. there must be some kind of push or pull to make things the way they are. that’s what he figures anyway - it’s easier to believe everything happens for a reason. an eye for an eye is all well and good, but nobody wants to pay the price. pretending that something will take care of it is a blank cheque to the bank of the universe; inevitably, it will bounce, but that problem is secondary.

here’s another thing nicky knows: time might heal all wounds, but it erodes all bonds if you aren’t careful. that’s just how it goes. “time is a human constuct,” aaron would say, and perhaps he’s right. only manmade creations can cause this much misery and damage.

here’s a fun fact: nicky hasn’t spoken to the twins in two years. he watches andrew’s games, from time to time, and occasionally he shoots aaron a text, but that’s not speaking, is it? speaking is more than words; it is sitting in andrew’s maserati and grinning all the way to eden’s twilight; it is the burn of muscle after a hard game and crashing into a beanbag afterwards; it is the tightness in nicky’s chest after he left palmetto state. nicky is an anomaly, he knows. but this is different to his parents, different to anything else. this time, he did not let them go because it hurt too much. he let them go because they knew him too well.

it is an ugly thing, to know how many people see your every flaw and every strength, and to slip away from them anyway.

but nicky has never liked looking back. retrospect is for cowards, and he’s not a coward - not in his own mind. there are some debts you can never repay. nicky knows too much about fate. and who is he, to reach out and grasp at nothing? for five years he tried; christmas cards and birthday messages and attempts at meetups that always went awry. there is nothing terrible about the act of giving up the ghost. sometimes it’s crueler to force a thing to keep on living.

perhaps this makes him a bad person. but what he tells himself is this: better to have a soft fade than a harsh burn. better to go gently than abruptly. and it’s not as if he’ll never see them again. there was no great fight, no sudden cut off point. it was like falling asleep - you don’t know it’s happening until your eyes are closed and it’s too late. in the end, nicky is not to blame. in the end, there is more than this.

letting go is always the hardest part, but that’s how it’s meant to be. there is a fine line between giving up and giving in.

nicky just hopes that he’s found it.

**Author's Note:**

> please leave a comment if you liked this piece x


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